Exclusive: First USGFX creditors committee meeting to be held July 20
FNG Exclusive… FNG has learned via regulatory filings that creditors of bankrupt Australian retail FX and CFDs broker Union Standard International Group Pty Ltd will hold their first formal creditors’ meeting next Monday, July 20. The meeting will be held virtually, by Zoom, due to strict Covid-19 regulations in Australia.
The company’s appointed administrators, Peter Paul Krejci and Andrew John Cummins of insolvency specialist firm BRI Ferrier, filed an initial agenda for the meeting which includes:
a) whether to appoint a committee of inspection; and
b) if so, who are to be the committee’s members.
That seems to be a formality, as an operating company with real debts and clients such as Union Standard, which operated the USGFX brand, will indeed have such a committee. A committee of inspectors in an Australian bankruptcy is a committee appointed from among the creditors of the company, It advises the administrator and monitors the conduct of a liquidator. The committee approves fees and in some cases approves the use of some of the administrator’s and liquidator’s powers on behalf of all creditors.
At the meeting, creditors may also vote to remove the administrators from office and appoint someone else as administrator of the company. That typically only happens if there is one large creditor, who wants his or her own approved administrator involved.
Additional agenda items include determining the remuneration of the external administrators, and approving the disbursements of the external administrators.
Creditors wishing to attend (and have a say at) the meeting need to submit their initial proof-of-debt to the administrators by the end of business this Friday, July 17.
It will be interesting to see if representatives of UK Premier League team Sheffield United FC are among those on the committee. USGFX has two years left on a multi-million dollar front-of-shirt sponsorship of SUFC. In a statement made late last week, reported initially exclusively at FNG, Sheffield United said it was business-as-usual as far as it was concerned vis-a-vis its main current sponsor, as it was only the Australian parent company which filed for administration. (A fact we believe is irrelevant, since there isn’t much to the USGFX-UK company, and it seems as if the contract with Sheffield United was really with the parent Australian company anyway).
USGFX filed for bankruptcy (formally called “voluntary administration”) and the aforementioned administrators were appointed on July 8. In a note posted on its website, USGFX basically lay the blame for its need to file for bankruptcy with ASIC, stating that its actions were “forced” by the regulator which “deeply harmed the USGFX brand… despite no substantial allegations against USGFX being brought to court by ASIC.”